by C. A. Gray
I realized I had fallen on my face as the Lord was speaking. Several long seconds after the voice had ceased, I lifted my face from the earth, trembling.
“Seven days,” I murmured.
I did as the Lord had said. I told Judith, and we together told our sons and their wives. That day I preached one last time to the onlookers.
“Today, this moment, is your last chance!” I cried out. “Once the Lord seals us inside, we will not be able to let you in, even if we wanted to.”
“Nor will you be able to get out!” shouted one heckler. Another cried, “Sooner or later those raptors are going to eat you all!”
“If the tigers don’t do it first!” cried another, and laughter rippled through the crowd.
My dismay became anxiety. I knew there were those in the crowd who might have responded to my message, without the peer pressure of the hecklers. Did they not understand that they were all about to die? How could I make them listen?
I was on the point of screaming with frustration when a sudden balm of supernatural calm came over me. I had done what the Lord had told me to do, but I could not make them change their minds. Their response was between them and Him. I had to let it go.
I drew back my shoulders, and cried out, “Very well. When the flood waters rise, remember that I have given you a way of escape, and you have all rejected it. I can do no more.” I turned and walked up the ramp of the open door to the ark. My family was already inside. I stood on the inner deck, tears pricking my eyes as I took one last look at the world around me, lush and verdant. Then with the help of my sons, I tried to raise the enormous door from the inside, but realized I could not—it was too heavy, and the leverage was against us. We could not even budge it. The jeers and laughter grew louder.
But then suddenly an unseen hand seemed to assist us from the outside. What one moment seemed impossible became almost effortless.
Once the door shut, it was eerily silent, and comparatively dark. We had some filtered light from the windows above by which we could see, but not much compared to the broad daylight outside.
“Well,” said Japheth, breaking the silence, “now what?”
“Now we wait,” I told him. “The Lord said the flood waters will come seven days from now.”
“Seven days!” exclaimed Ham. “Then why are we in here now ? Let me out, and I’ll come back in a week!”
I whirled on my son in the semi-darkness. “We are here now because the Lord told me we were to enter now, and I do not question the Lord!”
The subsequent silence was tense. Shem murmured, “Inbar and I will be in our chamber. Come on,” he said to his wife, taking her by the hand and leading her away. Japheth also took the cue, leading his wife Dafna to their chamber as well. With one last glare at me, Ham grabbed his wife Aya roughly and dragged her away too, leaving only Judith and me standing by the now closed door. She took a step closer to me, laying a hand on my chest.
“Dare I ask… if you are having any doubts?” she murmured.
Had she asked the question with any less deference, I would have snapped at her too. As it was, I sighed, wrapping her hand in mine.
“I have wrestled against doubt this whole time,” I confessed in a whisper. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. You think I don’t realize that none of this makes any sense? How is the Lord supposed to flood the earth? Where is the water to come from?” I shook my head, running a hand through my hair. Judith watched me but said nothing. “You’ve spent the better part of the last century thinking I’m insane, like everyone else—because all you’ve ever known, all any of us have ever known, is consistency. Things go on the way they always have. If the sun has always risen in the east, it’s a pretty good bet it will do the same thing again tomorrow. You think I don’t feel that? Yes, I heard the audible voice of God, but what if it was actually a voice in my own head—especially after a few decades pass and I don’t hear it again? I’ve wondered all of these things, Judith!”
She stared at me, amazed. After a long pause, broken only by the snort of the nearby baby elephant in its chamber, she asked, “Then what made you go on building?”
I didn’t answer her right away. I pursed my lips and thought for a long moment how to phrase this, and at last I told her, “Because I would rather stake my whole life on what I believe the Lord said, and be wrong, than ignore it, and have nothing worth living for anyway.”
I stared up at the filtered light from the opening in the ceiling as I said this, and then glanced at the cell where the two baby leopards slumbered. Judith slipped her hand in mine, and pressed her face against my shoulder.
“We’ll find out in seven days,” she murmured at last.
I looked down at the top of her head and gave her a half smile. “Well, the Lord spoke to me again this morning, and in the last week I watched two of every living thing climb aboard unbidden, in an orderly fashion. So, at the moment, I’m pretty confident I’m right.” I squeezed her shoulders. “Aren’t you?”
“I have to admit, that was pretty spooky,” she shuddered. I led her by the hand through the ark at a meandering pace, peering in to each cell where all the animals slumbered. I stopped to inspect the stegosaurus, which I’d never seen up close before. Next door were the pair of baby Tyrannosaurus Rex. They were about the size of the baby elephants, and hopefully much more docile than their adult counterparts.
“What infinite creativity He has,” I mused aloud.
Presently Judith murmured, “If this really happens, then you and I are like a second Adam and Eve.”
I gazed down at her. “We are indeed,” I agreed, and kissed the top of her head.
Those were the longest seven days of my life. I avoided Ham and Aya as much as possible, not wanting to listen to their doubts, sneers, and grumbling. I was glad to have a little time to figure out the waste situation, though: we designated one empty chamber not occupied by animals as the toilet for us humans, and set it up with empty barrels with removable lids. The animals conveniently awoke in shifts throughout the day, long enough to eat one meal, do their business, and fall asleep again. I found that I knew on instinct what to feed each of them, though how much took a bit of trial and error. I learned their schedules, and opened each chamber to place their meals while they slept, and to refill their water barrels, which I had purposely built to be shallow and wide. I worried not for the first time that water would slosh out of it when the waves rose, but that too was God’s problem, not mine. A few hours later, I went through a second time, cleaning out the excrement from each chamber as the animals slept again. At first I was a little nervous in the chambers of the predators, until I realized how silly this was. After all of this, would the Lord allow me to be gored by a rhinoceros before the flood waters even fell?
Each barrel of excrement, once full, was much too heavy to lift, I discovered. I pounded the lid closed with a mallet, since I really didn’t want it to open on me as I rolled it up the ramp I had created to the top window, grateful I had had the foresight to do this rather than stairs. I then heaved it over the side of the ark, and watched as it landed down below and rolled away on dry ground. Good enough, I thought. Not easy, but then, I had wondered how we might all keep ourselves occupied during the long months of confinement in here. There were so many animals to feed and cages to clean that if we divided the labor amongst the eight of us, none of us would be either overworked or bored. Not the most glamorous of jobs, perhaps, but it was certainly better to be occupied than not.
Over the next seven days as we got our system down for this and for preparing and consuming our own meals, I snuck up to the windows as often as I could to observe the peculiar sight of gathering darkness in the sky. I had seen white clouds before, but never gray ones, and certainly never black, as these were rapidly becoming. I wondered what this could mean. Was it a sign of the Lord’s impending judgment? Why black clouds?
On the fourth day inside the ark, the dark c
louds were joined by the sound of an ominous rumbling deep within the earth, reminding me of the voice of the Lord—except this noise had no words. At first it sounded only in the distance, but then it grew closer and closer, until the sound was so loud that it made Judith cry out and clamp her hands over her ears. It was accompanied by very brief and spectacular displays of jagged light across the sky. All eight of us soon watched transfixed at the upper window. Even Ham seemed frightened now.
On the seventh day, water began to fall from the sky. God had told me it would rain , but I had no idea what that meant until I saw it. It was light at first, just a drizzle—but over the next few hours it grew heavier, punctuated by the clap of what Japheth coined as thunder , and the flash of what Shem proclaimed lightning . The patter of the rain was loud against the roof of the ark. Judith clung to me as we watched in mingled awe and horror.
“This is incredible,” she admitted, having to shout over the sound of the rain, “but even at this rate, I don’t see how it can flood the whole earth, do you—aaaahhh!” She cut short her comment with a scream at a deafening sound. It was followed by another, and another. At first I could not immediately identify its source, but then I saw the geysers from the deep spewing water to the surface of the earth, as if under great pressure. They were not immediately beneath where the ark sat on the ground, but close enough that within just a few moments, we were buoyant. More explosions came after that. The animals, as frightened by the loud noises as we were, neighed and whinnied and stamped and roared. Judith clung to me, and I watched in amazement as the heavens opened up in torrents as if to join them. It was like standing under a waterfall, except the waterfall was everywhere, from above and from beneath.
On and on it went. The ark bucked on the sudden rising waves. I thought I could hear screams in the distance of the people down below, but it might have been my own imagination. I closed my eyes, clinging to the banister and thinking of all those souls to whom I had preached for over a century. Of those who had mocked me, thrown food at me, and kept others from receiving my message who might have done otherwise. I could feel no satisfaction that I had been proven right in the end. The thought of the dying creatures all across the earth overwhelmed me with sorrow. I suddenly realized that the Lord must feel the same way. He took no pleasure in this. It was simply the only way.
At last the ark leveled out a bit, once we were high enough above the geysers. Dafna and Aya suffered from seasickness those first few days, and could not help with caring for the animals, so the rest of us compensated. This was actually a good thing for me, as I found it distracting. Whenever I was not “at work”, I stayed up at the top of the ark, watching the rain. At first it was fascinating, but as the days stretched into weeks it became almost meditative. The sky, always such a vibrant blue before, was a blanket of dark gray. In the first few days to weeks, the water was murky and filled with debris, and I could still gaze out across the waters to see the tops of the hills and trees. Sometimes I thought I could see people huddled on them, trying in vain to escape. Later, when all had vanished except for the waters of the flood as far as the eye could see, the waters resembled the gray of the sky. No other colors were left on the face of the earth.
For forty days and forty nights, the rain continued. At last it slowed to a drizzle, and abruptly stopped.
Judith crept up behind me, gazing at the still dark sky for a long time before she asked in almost a whisper, “Is it over?”
“Looks like the rain has stopped,” I told her.
After a long pause, she murmured, “Now what?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. The Lord never told me anything more.”
For the next several interminable months, we continued with our shifts of feeding and cleaning up after the animals like normal. Every day I gazed out at the waters, hoping to see some treetops or mountaintops emerging. But for one hundred and fifty more days, all seemed exactly as it had before. I ignored my family’s whining, but even I grew weary of gazing out the uppermost window at the bleak nothingness.
One day after many months, as I was scooping up the excrement in the deer cell, I heard a great whistling sound. It seemed to envelop the entire ark, and a second after I heard it, we began to bob up and down as if caught up in sudden waves. I heard voices of confusion from my family, and then the pounding of feet. I stuck my head out of the cell, clinging to a banister so as not to lose my footing, and Ham and Japheth cried out from the window up top, “It’s wind! God sent a wind—”
“Maybe it will make the waters recede finally!” Judith called hopefully from the cattle cell, where she was performing her daily rotation.
“Ugh, I hope so! I can’t stand this place much longer!” shouted Aya from down below.
“You’re welcome to leave anytime,” Shem joked to his sister-in-law. “In fact, please do.”
The wind persisted steadily, and while I had a feeling that the ark steadily drifted downward, I could not prove it, as we had no landmarks. It was two months more, seven months since the flood began, before the bottom of the ark bumped up against something below. We felt the ark lodge, and stop.
“What just happened?” cried Judith to me.
I shook my head, running up to the top to peer out the window, Judith right beside me. “I don’t know, but I think we must have landed on something—the top of a mountain maybe? Since there is no land in sight…” Though the ark rested on rock, the sides were still flanked with water all around.
Yet three more months went by with nothing but gray water all around us. It was maddening to think we were making progress and then see nothing more for what felt like an age—though at least the skies were now blue again. I passed the time rehearsing to myself and to Judith the history of mankind as I knew it, up until this point. After all, anything we failed to record for posterity ourselves would be lost.
Then one day, I thought I saw a jagged rock in the distance. It could have just been flotsam, but I didn’t think so. The next day it was clear that what I had seen was indeed the top of a mountain, and it was part of a range! I cried out in excitement to all, “Land! I see land!”
Within minutes, my family dropped what they were doing and ran to the top of the ship. Judith buried her face in her hands and wept. Something about this made a lump spring to my own throat too. The next thing I knew, all of my daughters-in-law were crying, and tears ran down my sons’ faces and my own also. It was the first time we had wept since the great tragedy occurred. When the flood waters rose at first, we were too terrified and overwhelmed. Then we adjusted to our new, peculiar and seemingly interminable reality in boredom and resignation. But now, the reappearance of land brought to the surface all of the complicated emotions that we had suppressed before: grief, despair, and also relief. The emerging world below us would be just as foreign to us as if we had traveled to another land. I was sure each of us was trying to imagine what our lives would be like now. I could imagine nothing at all. I didn’t even know what the surface of the earth would look like now, as the bare rock I saw looked nothing like the lush green mountains I remembered.
Every day, I spent my free time gazing out that window, watching as the new landscape emerged. The mountains were indeed changed, looking forbidding and desolate. After another forty days, impatient for change, I went down into the cell shared by most of the birds. They had grown docile under my familiar hand, and though they were awake at the moment, none of them fussed when I entered. I took one of the doves in both hands, and offered my shoulder to a raven. It hopped aboard, and I closed the door behind me. Then I made my way back up the ramp, and opened the window at the top of the ark. The raven knew what to do and immediately took flight. I opened my hands and tossed the dove into the air also, and stood watching as they flew into the now blue sky and turned into specks in the distance. The raven landed on a mountaintop not too far away, rested for a bit, and then took off again for a peak further away. But within about fifteen mi
nutes, the dove returned to me. I reached out a hand to retrieve her, disappointed. I stroked her feathers as I made my way back down to her cell, hoping the raven would be all right. He had just been fed, so perhaps he would be.
“Soon,” I promised the dove. “I know. I’m ready to get out of here too.”
Seven days later, I took the same dove and tried again. She vanished, and I thought perhaps I had seen the last of her. But that evening before I went to bed, I went up to the window and found her waiting for me with an olive branch in her mouth. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of it. Something living! Something living that hadn’t been aboard the ark! Was it possible the Lord had just preserved this olive tree through all the chaos and despite the flood waters, or had it simply managed to grow and even sprout leaves in the few months since the flood waters had receded?
Judith had come up behind me, and asked in a flat voice, “She’s back, huh?”
I turned around and showed her the dove, but also held up the branch in my other hand. Judith gazed at it, eyes widening, and her chin quivering. In response, I wrapped the arm holding the branch around her shoulders, and pulled her toward me. We descended to drop off the dove in the bird’s chamber in silence, and then retired to our own.
Seven days later, when I released the dove again, she did not return.
While the earth may have been fit for bird habitation again, my family could not very well live on a mostly barren mountaintop, shared with all of the land dwelling animals aboard the ark. Restless as we were, and though our food supplies had dwindled, several months more passed with no change in our situation.
It was one year after we came into the ark that my sons and I removed the covering that made the roof for the windows. This gave us a better view. We were indeed lodged in the crag of a mountain, but so far as I could tell, the ground in the valley below was also dry. It was too far down to make out much detail, but I saw green down there, indicating that there had been enough time for vegetation to sprout. This was good, considering the animals would need something to eat once I released them from the ark.